News

Tidal HiFi account owners can upgrade their account (for free) with the tick of that new "HiFi / Master" option in Tidal's settings menu and stream from "more than 30,000" MQA encoded tracks. Right now.

"Flacit was founded in 2014 by Nelson Pass, Ph.D., an award-winning audio engineer and music producer, as an alternative to iTunes and other web sites that provide lots of tracks but at low fidelity. Even sites that feature so-called 'HD Downloads' are only providing the quality of the original older master, which is often an analog or standard definition digital recording."

Thanks to reader "tulysses", we have this response from (the real) Nelson Pass:

My attorney advises me to make a public announcement somewhere, and this looks like a perfectly good place.

Apparently there is a website called flacit offering music downloads and they have attached my name to it.

Neil Young and Pono are back in the news after a long hiatus of newsworthiness. Rolling Stone reports, "He's [Young] working with a Singaporean company on a method to 'maintain our quality level when we go to streaming.'" My best guess is that Singaporean company is none other than OraStream (who else would it be?), the company behind the Naxos high-res classical service.

Alan Turing created his computer music making machine at the Computing Machine Laboratory in Manchester, England. In 1951, a group of BBC broadcasters arrived to hear a music recital of computer-generated music generated by Turing's music machine. A recording of this event was saved to 12-inch acetate disc and scientists have recently done some digital housekeeping, bringing the tunes back up to correct speed (Auto-Tune?) while dusting off some noise.

The leaves are turning once again in time with the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest in Denver, CO which "features Mountains of Sound from the Affordable to the Absurd'". Next week, from Friday to Sunday, packs of audiophiles will descend on the Denver Marriott Tech Center in search of the affordable and the absurd? How about plain old fun.

Battery Studios is home to master mastering engineer and three-time Grammy winner Mark Wilder so it was with great pleasure to reply in the affirmative to Sony's invitation to hear about and hear their new Signature Series components. There are four products in the Signature line—MDR-Z1R headphones, NW-WM1Z and N!-WM1A Walkman players, and the TA-ZH1ES headphone amplifier—and we were treated to a listen and learn session which included presentations by Sony Acoustic Engineer Shunsuke Shiomi and Mark Wilder.

Stereophile has just published "MQA: Questions and Answers" authored by J. Robert Stuart, the co-creator of MQA. I consider this essential reading, and I'm not even done reading it!, for anyone interested in learning.

It took a while for this news to sink into someplace comfy and cozy but it finally has:

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 2, 2016 /PRNewswire/-- Leading home furnishings destination Crate and Barrel introduces The Listening Room, featuring exclusive furniture and accessories, cutting edge audio equipment and a curated collection of iconic vinyl recordings through the brand's new partnership with Capitol Records. Celebrating music as it was meant to be heard, The Listening Room is the perfect setting to enjoy the Capitol Records 75th Anniversary Collection, a limited release of 75 remastered vinyl recordings. The Listening Room collection will be offered in U.S. stores and online starting this September.

But if you want their CD-quality streaming service, Deezer Elite, you can only get it through Sonos (sigh). So what are we getting from Deezer? Another $9.99/mo. 320kbps lossy streaming service (there's no free tier for US customers).